


A Rotted-Out Tree

by VerAgarde



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Parent Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Phil and Techno are best friends, Techno isn't related, Wilbur Soot and TommyInnit are Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 02:20:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28770723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerAgarde/pseuds/VerAgarde
Summary: "There was nothing I or anyone could do to stabilize that tree house enough for it to ever be safe. The moment I saw the signs and figured it out, I already knew that it was going to come crashing down with my boys inside it someday, and they were going to be hurt badly—broken bones or worse—when it happened. Unless I put a stop to it."After the total destruction of L'Manburg, Phil and Techno return home. Unable to shake the weight of his regret, Phil tells Techno a story from when his sons were young in order to explain the choices he's made thus far.
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s), Technoblade & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Wilbur Soot & Technoblade & TommyInnit & Phil Watson
Comments: 8
Kudos: 69





	A Rotted-Out Tree

**Author's Note:**

> I've been writing for years but I've never written fanfiction before, until now. All thanks to a MINECRAFT ROLEPLAY.
> 
> Philza is one of my favorite characters, and I wanted to do a little exploration of his motivations, or how I've perceived them. Two dudes talking for 2000+ words, how exciting!

Like it was just another day, as if they’d just been working on the turtle farm or hunting charged creepers again and not razing a city to the earth, Technoblade and Philza trod the long walk back to the cottage. The snow was falling peaceful and still like it had the night Techno had given him that compass, and almost every night since. It muffled the sounds of their voices and dusted their shoulders, catching in long hair blowing loose. The sky was dark, now. It had been a long day.

Phil scraped the snow off the undersides of his boots on the edge of the stairs before heading inside. Techno followed him after a moment, taking the chance to check on Carl. The warmth of the house crashed over them both as the door was closed and the two old friends sighed in an accidental unison, then laughed.

“We’re just too in sync at this point, mate!” Phil laughed, sinking gratefully into one of the carved wooden chairs by the fireplace.

Techno grinned. “I can’t believe I’m turnin’ into Philza Minecraft, after all this time,” he joked. “You’re a bad influence on me, Phil.”

“A bad influence, on you?!” Phil shouted in mock rage, and the two dissolved into laughter again.

A familiar silence settled between them, then. Two pairs of boots came off and were left by the door, and two sets of scratched and dented netherite armor were unstrapped and set out to be cleaned and repaired later. Phil tossed his hat onto the chest beside him and combed his fingers through his hair with another sigh—this time, of exhaustion, and perhaps something deeper. 

Techno had taken off his coat. He ran his fingers along the soft fur trimming with a tightened jaw and a pensive expression. 

“Everythin’ smells like sulfur and smoke now,” he huffed, snout twitching. “It’ll take forever to get it out again.”

“Yeah,” Phil nodded, trying to work up another one of his laughs, “it tends to do that. When I cleared the Nether with TNT back home it was the same way. Remind me later and I’ll show ya a pretty solid way to get rid of the smell. For now, though—”

Phil groaned and stretched his back. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, and the exertion of the day was catching up to him, even though he’d largely stayed out of the fighting. Under that, though, he could feel the weight of the heaviness inside him, settling to the bottom like silt in still water. Where had he picked it up?

Was it from the screams of fear and desperation from untrained soldiers in makeshift gear as L’Manburg was lit up by the unearthly glow of the Withers? Was it from Tommy’s young face contorted with bitter anger until his voice and body shook with it? Was it from the streams of blue dripping down the cheeks of Wilbur’s ghost as he searched the debris? Or was it even older than that?

Phil looked up to find Techno staring at him. His expression was inscrutable and sharp as a sword in that way that Phil knew from experience meant he was reading someone.

“Phil, are you alright?”

“I’m fine, mate,” Phil chuckled, but Techno shook his head.

“Don’t try that on me,” Techno replied, crossing his arms. The dry monotone of his voice shielded a genuine concern that he’d never let show on his face. “I know you too well, just as much as you know me. You do this thing where you’re always laughin’, even when you’re angry, or uncomfortable, or sad. So don’t try and pretend that there’s nothin’ behind it this time.”

Phil couldn’t help another half-hearted laugh, though it dissolved into a sigh as he looked down at his hands. Techno could see through anything and cut right to the center of it with clean, brutal efficiency. It was admirable, really.

“Let me get some food in me,” Phil countered, rising from his chair, “then we’ll go outside and talk, okay?”

Techno raised an eyebrow, and nodded his assent.

When they were finally sitting on the porch steps, mugs of steaming hot soup in the hands of both men, Techno waited for Phil to speak first.

“I think my boys hate me now,” he finally admitted. “Or maybe they have for a while—who am I to tell?”

Techno grunted, taking tentative sips of the still-piping hot soup. The steam fogged up his glasses in the frigid night air, forcing him to remove them. “I mean, not much you can do about that, all things considerin’. Ghostbur is Ghostbur, he’ll just forget again, but Tommy is stubborn as hell. There’s no gettin’ through to that kid, believe me. He hates me too, for sure.”

Phil stared into his reflection in the broth as if it could give him all the answers. “Yeah, I s’pose so,” he murmured. “But I could tell they were both real hurt, and that’s what gets me. I wish it’d never had to come to this, y’know?”

Phil paused to watch his breaths drift away in little clouds, like dragon smoke. It had stopped snowing while they’d been cooking, and the stars were visible through the gaps in the clouds, cold and bright.

“Reminds me of a story from when Tommy was a kid, kinda,” Phil continued.

“He is a kid,” Techno snorted.

“You know what I mean, Techno.” Phil cracked a smile that slipped away just as quickly. “I think he was...eight? Or, wait, maybe he was ten… Well, either way, he and Tubbo found this abandoned tree house in the woods one summer. They used to go out every day to play in it, and they’d stay out there for hours, until it got dark again. They made me pack lunches for them every morning just so they wouldn’t have to come back inside at all. I don’t know what it was about that thing that they loved so much—maybe it was just having something special to call their own.”

“That tree house was real old, though, mate. It was coming apart all over the place, and the wood was worn out. It must’ve been sitting there untouched for a decade. Every night when they came back, I picked out splinters from their hands and bandaged scraped knees from falls. I got a little sick of it after a while, honestly” Phil chuckled. He stopped to gulp down some soup, both hungry and not quite eager to get to the next part of the story. “Hey, this is pretty good! You actually added salt this time, didn’t you?”

“That’s a very backhanded sorta compliment,” Techno remarked dryly, squinting at Phil. “I sure appreciate bein’ dragged out to sit in the cold just so you could have a good laugh at my cooking skills, Philza. I thought you wanted to talk about your feelings, but it turns out, you only wanted to hurt mine.” He shook his head. “All Philza Minecraft do is mock Technoblade, eat soup, and lie.”

Phil snorted and nearly choked on his soup, slapping his knee, eyes watering. He swallowed painfully and tried to stem the flow of his own giggling. Techno’s sarcasm was out in full force tonight, oh-so familiar to the older man and oddly comforting as well. It cleared some of the tension from his heart, and made it easier to speak. It felt like trust.

When he was done coughing and Techno was done laughing at him, Phil was able to continue the story.

“Right, right, sorry mate… But yeah, one day I got sick of those boys coming back all scratched up, and I decided to do something about it. So I grabbed my tools and went to go see this treehouse for myself, to see if there was anything I could fix. Maybe I could smooth out the wood, nail it back together more securely, just make it safer for them.”

“Or that’s what I thought, until I saw it up close.” Phil sighed, pushing his hand through his hair. “Techno, that thing, the whole tree it was built on—it was rotted out to the core. I have no idea how it bore their weight for so long. It was ready to collapse at any moment. There was nothing I or anyone could do to stabilize that tree house enough for it to ever be safe. The moment I saw the signs and figured it out, I already knew that it was going to come crashing down with my boys inside it someday, and they were going to be hurt badly—broken bones or worse—when it happened. Unless I put a stop to it. But I knew that nothing I could ever say to Tommy would be able to keep him from it. Like you said, stubborn.”

“So, I had to chop the whole tree down, treehouse and all.”

Phil grimaced as he got to that part of the story.

“Tommy hated me for it. He was heartbroken, and all anger and rage when he found out. He wouldn’t even speak to me for a week, and I’d hear him crying in his room over it. I tried to show him the tree afterwards, trying to make him understand why I had to do it and how much danger he and Tubbo had been in, but all he’d do was yell and scream at me and try to hit me. He was so convinced that it had been fine, and that it would have kept holding up because it had managed to hold them up for so long before. He couldn’t understand it, and nothing I said could get through to him, so I gave up. Better to have him hate me, I thought, than to see my son get hurt like he would’ve.”

Techno nodded. He looked thoughtful, almost solemn. “And that’s what happened with L’Manburg.”

Phil let out a long, deep breath that curled away into the arctic air. ”Exactly,” he replied, shoulders slumping. “Only this time, by the time I had arrived, they were already past the point of serious injuries. I get there, and the first thing I find is my Wilbur driven out of his mind by the stupid country—so beyond hope that it seemed like a mercy to— to—”

He pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut against the sudden onslaught of pain and grief threatening to resurface, still raw after all this time. His forehead creased with lines he didn’t remember having before all of this. Techno’s hand came to rest on his shoulder after a moment of silence—a comforting, stabilizing weight.

“I’ll never forgive myself for killing my boy,” Phil began again, hoarse. “I’m no hero, no matter if Wil believes I think I am. He loved that country too much, and it made him sick. It drove him to do terrible things. He used to bring people hope. And, well…” Phil trailed off. “After everything was said and done, when those kids were picking up the pieces he left behind, I couldn’t help but feel bad. So I stayed with them, tried to help them all out as best I could. Even after what happened with Wil, I wanted to be a better dad—the kind that would dry their tears. I tried to have faith in them, to be content with bandaging scrapes and pulling out splinters, but the longer I stayed, the worse it got.”

“I should’ve seen it coming earlier. I should’ve trusted my gut, Techno. Even when I was holding Wil as he took his last breaths, some part of me already knew that Tommy was going to die for that damn country too, unless I did something about it. I tried to ignore that feeling for so long, until those kids dragged you there in chains to execute you and we saw what that exile did to Tommy, and I finally had to face the truth. L’Manburg was just like that tree. It was rotted out beyond hope of repair, even if they couldn’t see it, and I wasn’t going to let it take anyone else away from me, no matter the cost.”

“No matter if they ended up hatin’ you for it,” Techno rumbled, echoing the thought Phil couldn’t voice himself.

Phil closed his eyes and nodded, throat tight and painful. “Yeah. And now we’ve arrived at that, and I have to live with it. I wouldn’t take it back, though, what we did. I just hope that things can start to turn for the better now.”

Techno was silent for a minute while he and Phil finished off their soup. When he spoke again, it was slow and patchy, like he was struggling to piece his words together in a way that pleased him.

“Phil, I…” Techno said, setting his mug down. He was looking at his hands, which were fiddling with a button of his shirt. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen next either, especially with you and… and Tommy. And Ghostbur too, I guess. But you’ve always been there for me, even when it meant goin’ up against the whole world. So I s’pose what I mean is I’ll be there for you, too. No matter what happens.”

Techno looked away, but his floppy ears gave his emotions away as they turned a sharp red. He’d never been good at communicating his emotions, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have any. Even if he had to force the words out with a stilted and unpracticed tongue, it only made his sincerity shine through all the clearer.

Phil’s eyes crinkled as a soft smile spread across his face. “Aw, mate…”

Techno stood abruptly, trying to quickly work up a scowl that Phil could see right through. “Don’t patronize me, Philza,” he groaned, ears still too red for his own good. “Let’s go inside already. I had to do most of the work today, fightin’ everybody while Dream sat around and played with redstone, and I’m too tired for any more of this.”

He held out his hand to help Phil up. Phil took it and heaved himself to his feet, unable to help the laugh that came welling up from his chest. It was warmer than before, buoyed up by a rekindled hope and the strength of not just the hand that clasped his, but of the unbreakable trust between them. The phrase went unspoken, but was heard all the same: 

‘For you, the world’

**Author's Note:**

> How do you guys add italics in here. I'm so confused.
> 
> Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed, and if you did or if you just have thoughts, feel free to leave a comment below! I will treasure every one of them.


End file.
